The Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Multiplication of Western Walls
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By James Petras, Axis of Logic

Axis of Logic

Saturday, Nov 15, 2014

Introduction

On November 9, 2014, Germany and its
Western Allies, celebrated the ‘Fall of the Berlin Wall’ and the subsequent ‘re-unification’of
the ‘two Germanys’. Prime Minister Merkel described the ‘historic event’ as a “victory
of freedom for all peoples in Europe and across the world.” The entire
Western media and officialdom echoed Merkel’s rhetoric, as 300,000 Germans
gathered at the Brandenburg Gate hailed their leader as she spoke of ‘one
people, one nation and one state in freedom, peace and prosperity...’ But
Merkel’s discourse is a self-serving chauvinist fabrication that distorts the
real consequences of a united Germany. Moreover, the Western celebration of
‘fallen walls’ is very selective.

The notion that Germany was ‘unified’
democratically is of dubious historical accuracy. The consequences of a
powerful unified Germany have not led to a peaceful prosperous Europe and
Germany’s current role in world politics, particularly its policies toward the
Middle East, North Africa and the Ukraine, has been anything but peaceful.

The Walls of Freedom and the
Walls of Prison

While NATO regimes celebrate the ‘Fall
of the Berlin Wall’ as the highest expression of freedom, these same political
leaders support, finance and promote the construction of oppressive walls
throughout world: Unified Germany and its NATO partners have supported Israel’s
Separation Wall dividing and caging millions of Palestinians for the better part
of two decades. Apparently there are progressive and reactionary ‘walls’ –
‘good walls’ and ‘bad walls’. Unlike the Palestinians, Berliners were never
deprived of basic necessities and subject to random displacement or even murder
– the Western airlift provided all for West Berliners. Israel’s Separation Wall
results in division and seizure of Palestinian land, ancestral homes, farms,
schools and cultural sites while centuries-old olive groves are razed –
depriving their owners of productive income.

The US has built its own massive
‘Security Wall’ along its Mexican border, incarcerating and even shooting
refugees fleeing Washington’s militarization of Central America and Mexico. The
US ‘Security’ Wall condemns millions of Mexicans and Central Americans to live
in terror and misery in murderous US client narco-states. In the past seven
years, over 100,000 Mexican civilians have been killed under the reign of
US-backed Presidents, who were elected through fraud, as they relentlessly
pursue the US mandated “War on Drugs”. Similar levels of killings ravage
Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala where narco-gangs, with the backing of
corrupt political, police and military officials, terrorize the cities and
countryside. The death toll from US military interventions in Central America
far exceeds those by the former-Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. The US border
wall ensures that the survivors of this terror will remain exposed to the
brutal rule of US-backed regimes.

At the same time, the civilized
‘European Union’ has erected its land and sea ‘Walls against refugees’
from Iraq, Syria, Libya, Lebanon and Palestine, fleeing NATO directed invasions
and proxy wars in their countries. According to the UN Commission on Refugees,
13 million civilians have been displaced by US wars in Iraq and Syria. Many
fleeing the war zones crash up against the European ‘legal walls’ – immigration
restrictions, concentration or “internment” camps and prolonged detentions
welcome their “flight to freedom”.

Chancellor Merkel chose not to mention
these ‘civilized’ walls against people fleeing NATO’s ‘humanitarian
interventions’. Nor have the Prime Ministers and Presidents of Europe or the US
and its ‘ally’ Israel acknowledged the deaths and suffering…because these are their
Walls, their own ‘barriers to freedom’.

Democratic Re-Unification or
Annexation by Force

Merkel glosses over the crucial fact
that the East Germans were never consulted or allowed to hold a free election
to decide what kind of relation they would like with the West German regime. They
were never asked under what terms and in what time frame “reunification” would
take place. The West German regime seized control and dictated economic and
social policies that destroyed their eastern neighbors’ economy by fiat. Hundreds
of thousands of East German factory-workers faced brutal arbitrary firings as
the capitalist ‘West’ shut closed state factories. East German farmers looked
on helplessly as their prosperous, stable co-operatives were dissolved on the
orders of West German officials. Where was the democracy in this policy of
brutal annexation and political viciousness that slashed the former ‘East’
Germans living standards, multiplied unemployment ten-fold, greatly prejudiced
the welfare benefits and employment of female workers and devastated
pensioners.? Over 1.5 million Eastern German workers were uprooted and became
economic refugees in the ‘West’ where wages were double the rate in ‘liberated’
East Germany. The wages were higher, but so were the job insecurity and the
loss of social welfare provisions of the East. And if the death of 138 East
Germans during 28 years, trying to escape over the Wall, was a tragedy, then
what should we call the thousands who have drowned or died other horrible
deaths trying to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe or to scale the Wall
separating the US and Mexico, or Israel’s Wall strangling six million
Palestinians?

There are many ‘death strips’ denying
Latin Americans, Palestinians, Middle Easterners their freedom from want,
blocking their escape from US-NATO wars and Israeli genocide. But those ‘atrocious
walls’ were not mentioned by Chancellor Merkel at the Brandenburg Gate as she
celebrated the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The
scribes and scribblers from the New York Times, the Financial Times and the Washington
Post did not mention these real, contemporary walls and their brutal toll. The selective
denunciation of certain Walls contrasts with the politics of erecting ‘other’,
more formidable Walls. Western walls of exclusion carry with them a denial of
responsibility for the political and economic conditions that has driven
millions of refugees to flee Central America, Palestine, the Middle East and
North Africa.

US intervention and support of proxy
death-squad regimes and the brutal military in Central America, from the 1960’s
to the 1990’s, resulted in over 250,000 civilian deaths and the displacement of
over 2 million refugees.

US-EU invasions and proxy wars in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Libya and Syria for over a decade have uprooted more than 13
million people and killed well over million civilians.

Israel’s wars and occupation against
the Palestinian people have resulted in over 500,000 Jewish colonial settlers
grabbing Palestinian land since 1967.The self-proclaimed Jewish state forcibly
displaced hundreds of thousands and killed, maimed and jailed over 300,000. To
admit that the West constructs and maintains its own system of atrocious walls
inevitably points to the policy of decades of prolonged bloody imperialist wars
leading to millions of refugees.

Imperial wars are characterized by the
construction and maintenance of complex ‘Western Walls’, far deadlier
and brutal than the Berlin Wall and less likely to fall. In fact, Western Walls
are multiplying and being fortified by the latest surveillance technology. Larger
budgets and more lethal arms for anti-immigrant police, has led to the brutal
hunt, capture and incarceration of refugees – as Western regimes become more
like police states .

The Malignant Consequences of
the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Annexation of East Germany

The annexation of East Germany vastly
increased the economic power of Germany, providing German capital with several
million skilled workers and trained engineers at no cost. Germany’s enhanced
power dictated the course of the European Union’s economic policy. With the
onset of the economic crisis, Germany’s capitalist and political elite were
well positioned to dictate the terms of ‘recovery’ – and impose the entire
burden on the working and middle classes of Southern Europe and Ireland. Germany’s
ruling class, in firm control of the EU directorate, forced “austerity
programs” on Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Ireland. These regressive
policies, which ensured that creditors would recover their loans with interest,
led to spiraling unemployment rates, in some cases of over 50% for young
people, and long-term, large-scale decline in living standards. ‘Unified
Germany’ flexed its newly found economic muscle and extended its hegemony over
the EU and ensured debt payments from its European subjects.

Unified Germany’s economic power led to
renewed political and military aspirations to engage and assert its presence in
the US led imperial wars in the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and the
Ukraine. By the end of the first decade of the 21st century ‘united
Germany’ was profitably supplying weapons, logistics and military missions in
Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. It provided Israel with weapons and economic aid
while Palestinians were expelled from their homes and land. Merkel’s imperial ambitions were revealed in
her wholehearted backing of the far-right coup in Ukraine. Subsequently Germany
imposed sanctions against Russia and supported the Kiev regime’s savage
military blitz against the Donbass. In the Ukraine, Germany once again, as in
the 1930’s, found allies among neo-Nazi collaborators and thugs willing to
slaughter ethnic Russian speaking federalists in the East. Merkel’s dream is to convert the Ukraine into
a German-American client state, where German exports would replace Russian
goods and German agro-mineral investors can exploit the country’s raw
materials.

Conclusion

It is obvious that Merkel, Obama and
other imperialist rulers have a double standard with regard to ‘Walls’ –
they denounce ‘Communist Walls’ while supporting murderous ‘Capitalist
Walls’ against refugees; they celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall while
they build bloodier Walls against the victims of their imperial wars.

Apart from the cant and hypocrisy of
Western officialdom, there is a political logic guiding these policies. The
West’s criteria, for deciding which Walls are worthy of support and which
Walls should fall, runs along the following lines: Walls that keep out victims
of imperialist wars are progressive and necessary for ‘national security’;
Walls that protect Communist, nationalist or leftist regimes are repressive,
dehumanizing and must fall.

If we consider the larger political
consequences of an event, like the fall of the Berlin War and the subsequent
arbitrary annexation of the East, it is clear that ‘re-unified’ Germany’s
exercise of power has had a profoundly negative impact on the economies of
Southern Europe and has concentrated dictatorial political powers in the hands
of German decision-makers operating through EU headquarters in Brussels. Unified
Germany has renounced its passive role and re-asserted its role in world
politics: slowly at first as a passive junior partner to US imperialist wars in
the Middle East and now, more decisively, by linking up with Ukraine rightists
and thugs and imposing economic sanctions on Russia.

Germany’s ‘great fall’ after World War
II required a half-century to “put all the pieces together again”. But once in
place, Germany seeks to project world power, particularly through its proxies
in the EU and NATO, in alliance with US imperialism. The Fourth Reich
increasingly looks back to the Third Reich.

James Petras latest book is the Politics of Empire:The U.S, Israel and the Middle East (claritypress@usa.net)

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